Wednesday, February 22, 2006

"[T]he main objective of my writing today, is to nail the lie that to reject Zionism as it is practised today is in effect to be anti-Semitic, to be an inheritor of Hitler's racism. That argument, with the Holocaust in the background, is nothing other than moral blackmail. It is highly effective. It condemns many to silence who fear to be thought anti-Semitic. They are often the very opposite. They are often people whose heart bleeds at Israel's betrayal of its true heritage."

- Paul Oestreicher, chaplain at the University of Sussex, former member of the Church of England's general synod, and director of the Centre for International Reconciliation.

Oestreicher describes his heritage: "I say this as the child of a German Jewish-born father who escaped in time. His mother did not. I say it as a half-Jewish German child chased around a British playground in the second world war and taunted with 'he's not just a German, he's a Jew.' A double insult. But I say this too as a Christian priest who shares the historic guilt of all the churches. All Christians share a bloody inheritance."